Comments on: Are We Becoming Complacent

By: Gary Barber

Gary Barber — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 15:26:52 +0000

@Chris – Yes you have it 100%. We have changed the approach. Changed focus, for the better. We need to bring the remaining 80% of the industry in the fold. However the question remains, what are people doing to foster the next generation of people to help develop the standards etc. We are still going to need these people.

@Brian – That’s what I’m getting at the general guard has changed its focus or stepped aside. Standards and best practice are important. But they are not the first and last word in web design and development

@Scott – question is how do we mix it with the mainstream web people that don’t attend events or just stay with their focused local user groups (if you are lucky).

By: Scott G

Scott G — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 04:33:26 +0000

Chris has a good point re: target audience.

I think the standards soap box is a bit dead and mainstream standards is starting to pick up a bit.

So time to get off the soap box and get into the mix of it all. Blend in with the crowd and start to fight from the inside of the larger companies.

Douglas Bowman, Jeff Veen and many of these kind of guys are no longer preaching but doing. They may be working for Google but I think they have a long way to go on the standards front by far.

It’s just a bit of an evolution of what was started many years ago… not complacency so much.

By: Brian Reindel

Brian Reindel — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 16:27:10 +0000

I do not think it is a matter of complacency, but a matter of priority. Of all the battles a senior developer can fight with clients, co-workers and the community at large, why choose standards? To be honest, there are several other exciting fronts that I would rather invest my time in that provide more satisfaction. I understand the importance of standards and educating upcoming designers and developers, but any arguments you could make have already been made, and the information is readily available. Point them in the right direction, and hope for the best.

By: Chris Heilmann

Chris Heilmann — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 07:33:37 +0000

Personally I shifted my audience target. There is not much point to advocate on the commonly known mailing lists or forums as these discussions end up in detailed threads about pet-peeves and anal retentive markup masturbation. The “standards war” is not won, but it has become a stalemate as people who evangelize target those who already believe to gain a quick win and those who really would want and need that information will never reach it as they don’t get time to read mailing lists or money to attend conferences.

The web standards movement has become a bit inbred and it is time we look outside and see where we can help. This also means knowing what ails people and how they have to work before we actually go there and preach of the land of milk and honey. The question to the audience on every conference I’ve been at was “who here still creates table layouts” which will result in nobody as people are too scared to stand out as the kid who does it wrong. The question should be “who here has to work with systems that create bad markup?” and then we could help those to find a way around that.

Last year’s Highland Fling conference was about “Progressive Enhancement” and was a treat. I proposed next year’s topic to be “remedial development” and covering tricks and concepts how to clean up bad code, as this is what we do most of the time anyways.

My @media Ajax call will be about writing JavaScript for large projects and distributed teams.

All in all I don’t think there is a lot of complacency, there is just a shift in target and we should encourage new people to step up as a lot of the big names in standards were too busy giving presentations and workshops to really get their hands dirty in what people do have to work with.

By: Ian Hickson

Ian Hickson — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 05:28:13 +0000

I don’t think there’s two agendas — there’s probably many hundreds of agendas, one for each person contributing to the effort!

Personally (as editor of the HTML5 spec) I’m trying very hard to address the needs of everyone’s agendas, insofar as they are compatible. Ensuring that HTML becomes more usable to people with handicaps (as well as people who are physically and emotionally healthy but who have computers with limited or unusal capabilities, which is often the same thing as being handicapped) is high on my list of priorities.

If you have any specific concerns about the HTML5 spec, please feel free to post to one of the lists (public-html@w3.org or whatwg@whatwg.org) or, if you’re not a member and don’t want to join, feel free to e-mail me directly (ian@hixie.ch).

By: Gary Barber

Gary Barber — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 03:44:52 +0000

@mpt. Thanks for the link. I wasn’t taking about the documented web pages, but the discussion on two lists. There does seem to be two distinct agendas occurring. I have a concern we may end up with a backward step in web accessibility etc.

By: mpt

mpt — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 02:51:20 +0000

"There are two lists 1) WHATWG by HTML5 and 2) HTML5 by W3C with it seems overlapping members with two distinct agendas from the WHATWG camp. I worry do we have two drafts of HTML5, I hope not." Instead of worrying, why don't you read it and find out? The very first page says: "This specification is also being produced by the W3C HTML WG. The two specifications are identical from the table of contents onwards."

By: Nathanael

Nathanael — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 14:16:20 +0000

Time definitely; I’m so busy at the moment I barely have time to focus and make sure I’m not getting in my design and coding practices – let alone contributing to the greater good.

But I admit also – the initial hype of web standards for me has died down a little; I’ve lost sight of the value and importance of it – and if asked “So why should I make my page WCAG/W3C AA compliant” or “Why does it matter if my XHTML doesn’t validate” … I’d be inclined to say “I can’t be bothered answering that again”.